When will Finland change its suspicious views of migrants and cultural diversity?

Christian Thibault, chairman of Rasmus, told Migrant Tales a while back something significant about how matters change in Finland concerning migrants in this country. He said that the Finnish Football Federation wasn’t very active in providing referee courses in different languages. When they noticed that ere was a chronic shortage of referees, matters changed.

In the same way the the Finnish Football Federation understood that it must serve people that speak different languages in this country, it is pretty much what is going on in Finland concerning our ever-growing cultural diversity. We speak a lot about integration, two-way adaption, but what happens at the end of the day is assimilation, one-way adaption.

Assimilation, or one-way adaption, is an expectation that society won’t change no matter how many people from different cultures and religions move to your country. The process is a bit like sitting on a sofa and telling newcomers that they must adapt to me. There are many types of sofas like in the above picture that could represent regions or countries. All have the sofas, however, have the same expectation in assimilation: I have privileges, you don’t. I therefore call the shots in this country. Source: Sairafurniture.

So the first step, when Finland starts to notice that it needs migrants to do those jobs that they don’t want to and when they notice that migrants work for less and twice as much as any white Finns, only then will matters begin to change.

The latter attitude change is only the first step. We’re still light years away from other subsequent steps where migrants and non-white Finns will be treated equally by this society.

That last stage, which is the core of our struggle in this country, will take generations. We can always speed up the process by forming a social movement like the Civil Rights Movement in the United States (1955-68).

White Finns don’t have to worry about migrants rising up and demanding equal rights because too many of us are more conservative and anti-immigration than some white Finns.

Some may choose to be Finnish Uncle Toms, or Teemu-setäs, or mamusas a means to gain greater acceptance.